Police questioning juvenile in birth of baby on plane

Published 7:00 pm, Sunday, March 30, 2008

A 14-year-old girl delivered a stillborn fetus in the bathroom of an airplane on a return flight from a middle-school field trip and disposed of the body in a wastecan, police said Monday.

Police were called to Bush Intercontinental Airport after a cleaning crew found the fetus inside a wastebasket in the bathroom of a Continental Airlines plane about 15 minutes after the plane landed Sunday afternoon.

The Boeing 737 plane landed in Houston on a non-stop flight from New York's LaGuardia Airport. The plane, which was about 30 minutes late, carried 144 passengers and six crew members, among them a group of chaperoned middle-school children returning from a school trip.

The girl, who authorities did not identify, told police she didn't know she was pregnant.

"We're dealing with a scared child at this point," investigator Keith Lovelace said.

Police questioned the girl late Sunday night.

Police Sgt. Ryan Chandler said results of the investigation would be turned over to the Harris County district attorney's office "to decide whether or not they're going to file any criminal charges."

"We are trying to make determinations of where and when this occurred, how long into the flight," police spokesman John Cannon said. "All indications are it occurred sometime on the flight."

Houston police are involved because the fetus was discovered within the city limits.

A report from the medical examiner's office on the fetus was not expected before Tuesday at the earliest.